Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of calendaring and scheduling and more particularly to calendar entry management in a calendaring and scheduling (C&S) system.
Description of the Related Art
Calendaring systems have formed the core component of personal information management software and firmware applications for decades. Initially, a mere calendar display, modern calendaring systems provide scheduling and alarm functions in addition to full integration with contact management, time entry, billing and project management applications. The typical calendaring application minimally provides a mechanism for scheduling an event to occur on a certain date at a certain time. Generally, the event can be associated with a textual description of the event. More advanced implementations also permit the association of the scheduled event with a particular contact, a particular project, or both. Furthermore, most calendar applications provide functionality for setting an alarm prior to the occurrence of the event, as well as archival features.
Several software products include support for Calendaring & Scheduling (C&S). Known C&S products include Lotus™ Notes™, Microsoft™ Outlook™, and web-based products like Yahoo!™ Calendar™. These products allow one to manage personal events including appointments and anniversaries. C&S products also typically allow one to manage shared events, referred to generally as meetings. Electronic C&S software allows a group of people to negotiate around the scheduling of a proposed event such as a meeting, with the goal of selecting a time that allows most of the group to attend.
Specifically, collaborators who participate in e-meetings often maintain a personal schedule managed by a scheduling system. Collaborators can schedule e-meetings within the personal schedule sua sponte, or the collaborators can schedule e-meetings responsive to the receipt of an invitation. An invitation typically contains data regarding the e-meeting such as a topic, list of invitees, and most importantly, a date, time and location for the e-meeting. Using this data, the invitee can be prompted either to accept or decline the invitation. Oftentimes, the acceptance or declination of an invitation can be accomplished with a single user action such as a mouse click.
The typical C&S system provides a thirty (30) day calendar view for all events scheduled during the thirty days reflected in the calendar view. Each day in the thirty day calendar view can display twenty-four hours of time slots for the day. Notably, while the thirty day calendar view can be a very helpful tool for the average C&S system user, limitations subsist in the thirty day calendar view which makes it difficult for some C&S system users to readily identify important calendar data for a scheduled calendar event in the C&S system.
In this regard, in a C&S system, a meeting chairperson can schedule a calendar event involving a multiplicity of C&S users—sometimes dozens, hundreds or even thousands of C&S system users. For the meeting chairperson, it can be important to know how many of the invited C&S system users have agreed to participate in the scheduled calendar event. It further can be important to know from where the invited C&S system users will participate in the scheduled calendar event. For a scheduled calendar event of only a few invitees, it is a trivial exercise to open the scheduled calendar event into a single day view, and then a single time slot view to identify the requisite calendar data. For a scheduled calendar event of many invitees, however, such an exercise can be exhausting and error prone.